Posts Tagged ‘fun’

I want to share some ideas about the success of the Russian openSUSE community, and try to answer the question about its popularity. As you can see it is one of the top places:

The reason for the high popularity of this distribution in Germany is of course the fact that the German SuSE distribution and the main branch of development is located in Nuremberg. Popularity in the U.S. is due Novell – an American company, and of course the language is English. But why are so many people in Russia choosing openSUSE?

Good question. One of the main things that influence the choice of distribution – the quality and localization. The global community plays a top role for quality of distribution and local make it appropriate for Russian language users (of course a local community can be as part of a global community).

Perhaps most important is the documentation. And of course, not everyone wants (or can) read the documentation in English. Everyone wants to read the documentation in their native language. The distribution may be in a good shape and stable, nice and convenient, but without documentation it will use very few. Translated documentation is very important to the community. The translation must have a high quality, understandable, and as it must be kept up to date.

For the community its also profitable that 2 guys from the community working for Novell (in Nuremberg and in Prague). This provides better communication between “developers – community”. It helps to be closer to the project. This allows you to always be aware of all the major news of the project. And of course the translation is much better if they are engaged not just as a translator, but the employee who works on the distribution.

Of course this also applys for software. Although it is not as important as documentation, it still makes an impression on the quality of distribution. Everyone wants to work with the software in their native language %)

A successful community is a group of people who love openSUSE, who understands why the software should be free, who wants to make openSUSE better and better… every day.

On this week the leading KDE developers met together again. This time it was held in Nürnberg, in the openSUSE premises and was kindly made possible by Novell and KDE e.V.
26 hackers, who make KDE better.

For me it was first time, where I met hackers not for drinking a cup of beer, but for working, for hacking, for learning… and I think in this time I got much more fun.

We started at 9-10 am and finished it at 1-2 am. Yes, these two days we hacked like crazy. I’m not so good in KDE, I mean – I’m just trainee in SUSE/Novell, but in these two days I took a lot of information about KDE (arhitecture), Solid, Plasma, methods of project’s buildings (cmake), etc.

I have worked before on KNetworkManager. It was just a couple of patches (Qt/KDE3 based), and KNM has another aspects of integration with hardware as we have now in KDE4. In KDE4 we have SOLID, and this makes more easy to asking for such things like, for example, wired connection or to find hidden SSID wi-fi…

With Sebastian Kügler and Will Stephenson, we worked together on functionality to easily connect to wired, wireless and mobile broadband networks and also to VPNs. As I said, I don’t did so much, but I started working on support for connection. Maybe next month I will be able to show that I did.

I would like to thank everyone with whom I spent those 2 days. Especially Will, who always supports and helps me to become a KDE developer.

Just laptop and headphones, book and a bit eat/drink for trip time and of course rube’s cube are in my rucksack 🙂 On last weekend I was on FOSDEM.

FOSDEM is probably the most developer-oriented European Free and Open Source conference/event. As usual it was in Bruxelles, Belgium on first weekend of February. I was there with another Novell/SUSE employees. Majority of they are responsible for work with community. For example, boosters team.

On 5th February we went from Nuremberg at 12 am (by bus) and was in Brussel at 9 pm. At half past ten we (Holgi, Dinar and me) were on the beer event. What can I say about this evening? It was really nice to meet and speak with another developers for a cup of beer 🙂

The main thing that happens on conferences is learning. This was main reason why I was there and why Novell/SUSE help me to visit FOSDEM. A lot of presentation/talks about KDE, or packaging (RPM), or BuildService or… a lot about another open source projects…

I like such events 🙂 It’s not only interesting presentations through which you open/learn a lot of new, but also possibility to get acquainted with other developers or is simple with enthusiasts whom it is unconditional as bring the contribution to development free and open source software.

The next evening I have devoted to walk across Bruxelles. It was very interesting to speak with people there. I have made a lot of photos.

For sure, I’m going to visit FOSDEM in next year, but for next time it will be depends on money. Anyway I will recomend to visit this event for every Linux-/*BSD- user/developer.

The boxed version of openSUSE 11.1 comes bundled with a LED-flashlight. Nice black and sturdy aluminum, Modern design with 9 white LEDs, no old-fashioned bulb that would produce more heat than illumination. Not flimsy, not heavy, just practical and quite bright. Batteries included. Exactly what I like.

But alas, this high-tech-toy is not perfect. The LEDs produce a strange unnatural light, which makes people look really sick. It gives a bluish-greenish tint to everything. This I don’t like. Okay, it is state of the art with regard to white LEDs, so this is no real reason to complain. Still, it leaves room for improvement.

Let us adjust the color of the light, so that objects look more natural. This posting explains you how to do it in 3 easy (or 4 not so easy) steps.(more…)